LEAFCUTTER ANT: Hide your ficus plants, put away your poinsettias — it's the leafcutter ant! Crazy as it seems, we have a couple of unique things in common with this little creature. Until humans started farming around 10,000 years ago, leafcutter ants were the only animals in the world to grow their own food from fresh vegetation. And like us, they use their very own "chemicals" to protect their gardens from fungal pests. These chemicals are actually antibodies produced by bacteria that live on their skin. A leafcutter ant colony functions like a beehive, with a queen, drones and workers — only the workers are much more specialized. There are scouts, which find the food; foragers, which harvest the leaves and carry them back to the nest; minima workers, which protect the foragers from tiny predators; soldiers, which fight off large predators; and workers of different sizes that process the leaves into smaller and smaller fragments. These fragments are placed in the fungus culture, which is tended to by some of the colony's smallest workers; they harvest nutritional bodies from the culture and distribute them to the larvae. The tiniest workers tend to the colony's growing brood, and heap workers aerate the garbage piles generated by all those ants — up to 8 million in a single colony!